A great discovery’

Friday

Mar 7, 2014 at 12:01 AMMar 7, 2014 at 11:24 PM

Sean Flynn Daily News staff writer

NEWPORT, R.I. — Gerald W.R. Ward, a curator emeritus at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, began a recent lecture at the Colony House with a slide showing a silver punchbowl from the early 1700s that Sotheby’s auction house sold for $5.9 million in 2010.

That captured the attention of the large audience gathered to hear Ward talk about a silver teapot now owned by the Newport Historical Society and made by Boston silversmith Paul Revere.

Artist John Singleton Copley painted a portrait in 1768 of Revere holding a teapot much like the one in the society’s collection. That was the period when Revere was making elaborate, highly stylized silver items. Beginning in the 1780s, he made silver items in the neoclassical style, abandoning the rococo style, Ward said.

The high monetary value of rare colonial silverware was a bit of a surprise to Ruth Taylor, executive director of the Newport Historical Society. “That made me very nervous,” she said after Thursday’s lecture.

The Revere teapot is stored in a vault, she said, and exhibited only on special occasions, perhaps next in the Brick Market Museum on July 4, in celebration of Newport’s 375th anniversary.

It is likely the Revere teapot here would sell for less than $1 million, Ward said, but such items come on the market very rarely. No one expected the Sotheby’s punchbowl to sell close to the price that broke all records for a silver piece, he said.

The Newport Historical Society received a significant collection of documents, costumes and artifacts from Frances Raymond in 1998. Adams Taylor, Ruth Taylor’s husband and the society’s collections manager at the time, was unpacking a box from the collection when he saw the teapot, his wife said. (Adams Taylor resigned his position when she became the society’s executive director.)

“This is really nice,” Ruth Taylor recalled her husband saying as he admired the craftsmanship. Then he turned it over and saw the “Revere” icon the nation’s most famous silversmith stamped on the items he crafted.

“Really?” was his surprised reaction, his wife said.

The Historical Society first showed the piece about five years ago to Ward, who confirmed the value of the find. His full title is senior consulting curator and senior curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture emeritus at the Museum of Fine Arts. He was the senior curator at MFA before his retirement and still is active in museum activities.

Ward and his wife, Barbara McLean Ward, authored with three other experts a 1,241-page book called, “Colonial Massachusetts Silversmiths and Jewelers.” The book covers all 370 silversmiths and goldsmiths — terms used interchangeably at the time — who were active in Massachusetts before the Revolutionary War. Published in 1998, the book has appendices that list every known piece made by the colonial artisans.

The Revere teapot discovered by the Newport Historical Society was unknown to the experts and was not listed in the book.

“It’s a great discovery and it’s a great object,” Ward said.

Why is the teapot considered so rare?

“New England patrons were not enamored with the rococo style,” Ward said.

The Clarke family of 18th- and 19th-century Newport businessmen and bankers had passed down the teapot that ended up in possession of Raymond, a descendent of the family.

It traces its roots back to Jeremy Clarke, one of the founders of Newport but not related to a more famous founder, John Clarke, said Bert Lippincott, the society’s historian. The Jeremy Clarke family had relatives in Boston.

The Clarke family that owned the teapot includes Peleg Clarke, a merchant mariner in Newport who sailed into Boston Harbor when the Boston Tea Party was taking place in December 1773, Lippincott said. Colonists protesting a new tea tax destroyed a shipment of tea from the East India Co.

Ward talked about the long life of Revere (1734-1818), and many of his works of silver craftsmanship over the decades. Ward also spoke about the works of Revere’s silversmith contemporaries.

He was the son of a French Huguenot who was born Apollos Rivoire, came to Boston at the age of 13, became an apprentice to silversmith John Coney and later anglicized his name to Paul Revere, Ward said.

His son, also named Paul Revere, became an apprentice to his father and took over the shop soon after his father died in 1754. The son became famous for his ride to Lexington and Concord in 1775 to warn colonial leaders that the British were marching on them and to urge them to move the military supplies.

After the Revolutionary War, Revere returned to his silversmith shop and branched out into other fields of production. For example, in 1800, he became the first American to successfully roll copper into sheets for use as sheathing on naval vessels.

Revere’s fame rose to new heights in 1861 when Henry Wadworth Longfellow published the poem “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” Ward said.

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